


Got Your Back

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Naruto
Genre: Akatsuki Gift Exchange 2020, Banter, Hidan being a little shit, M/M, Mission Fic, some exploration of possible applications of Kakuzu's powers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:34:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28447761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Hidan steals one of Kakuzu's masks. Somehow, this turns into a declaration of love.
Relationships: Hidan/Kakuzu (Naruto)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 75
Collections: Akatsuki Gift Exchange





	Got Your Back

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Clever_Girl_22](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clever_Girl_22/gifts).



> For Clever_Girl_22. I took your first prompt- I hope you like it!

The problem with Hidan was that he was occasionally, when Kakuzu least expected it, a good ninja. 

They had been tailing a Kumo cell consisting of a jounin and several chunin for several days when Hidan, who had drifted back bit by bit over the course of the afternoon until he walked just behind Kakuzu’s elbow instead of at his side, shot an arm out snatched one of the masks of Kakuzu’s back. Left in its place was a mass of black threads wrapped in a messy, pulsing ball with the trailing end severed. There must have been a kunai hidden up his sleeve, though the movement had been too quick and too unexpected for Kakuzu to track, so all he saw was the split-second glint of the desert sun on metal. 

Kakuzu went stone-still. 

“Wow, Kakuzu, those reflexes of yours are getting a little shitty. I thought you said you  _ weren’t _ getting slow in your old age!”

“Hidan,” Kakuzu growled. “We’re supposed to be blending in. Give it back, and quit goofing off before I’m forced to eliminate you for the sake of the mission.”

“I  _ am  _ blending in! Look at me, I’m a mindless ANBU drone!”

Hidan slid the now-empty piece of pottery over his face like an ANBU mask. 

Rage exploded in Kakuzu’s chest. A surge of threads from a seam in his shoulder shot out and pierced Hidan’s skin and surface-level muscles, then slammed him into the coarse stone of the desert steppe. Hidan’s hiss as he bellyflopped into the rock was only minorly satisfying. 

Unfortunately, Hidan used his hands to press the mask securely to his face instead of using them to catch himself, so Kakuzu couldn’t grab it as it dropped. 

“Give it back, Hidan.”

“Why should I? You still haven’t given back my heart, and you stole  _ that  _ like three missions ago! It’s not good for it to fucking languish in a sealing scroll, you know.”

“So what? You’ll live.”

Hidan stuck out his tongue.

Underneath his skin, Kakuzu’s threads writhed like a nest of snakes, making his skin bulge and heave as though rocked by an earthquake. Hidan stared in open glee. His eyes traced individual waves of skin in anticipation of a fresh flood of threads. He even slid the mask to the side so it wouldn’t block his view.  _ This _ was why he’d killed all of his previous partners. Shinobi these days were too frivolous, too  _ playful,  _ even when the success of a mission was on the line-

Overhead, a desert buzzard screamed. One of the Kumo chunin glanced up to trace the arc of its flight overhead. 

The dying echos of the bird’s cry rang in Kakuzu’s ears, bringing him back to himself. 

Air whistled through his nose as he breathed in as deeply as his lungs could manage, then slowly breathed out. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. The wriggling threads slipped back into orderly patterns and went still. Rage was something he’d never learned to box up or let go of, but he could set it aside.  _ For now. _

“How unfortunate that Leader-sama sees fit to recruit children to do grown-up work. Come on- the target is on the move again.”

Hidan’s expectant smirk twisted into a disappointed sneer. 

“Is that it? Come the fuck on, old man! What, have you finally gotten so ancient and decrepit that you can’t win a little game of keep away?”

Kakuzu offered an unimpressed look. 

“The problem with you young shinobi these days,” he deadpanned, “is that you’re all too used to falling back on structure.”

Hidan’s disappointment morphed into horror.

“Are you honestly giving me a fucking  _ back in my day _ lecture?”

“Things really started going downhill when Hashirama and Madara started the trend of establishing permanent Hidden Villages. Before that, shinobi had to learn fast or die. And when I say learn, I don’t just mean learn jutsu, like some of you young’uns sometimes think. I mean things like how to focus even when you aren’t consciously focusing, or how deadly serious any mission can become at a moment’s notice.”

“Come on, Kakuzu, you’re bloody ancient, but not that ancient! You can’t have been that old when they started building Hidden Villages-” 

“There was none of this namby-pamby  _ Academy _ business; knowledge was passed down through clans, alliances, and apprenticeships that you had to earn yourself. Back in my day, there was no nanny Kage handing out a sensei to each child who managed not to trip over their own feet in a spar. There was no convenient chain of command to lean on, just whatever each clan or traveling band came up with for themselves.”

“Holy shit, Kakuzu, shut up! Do you even hear yourself?  _ Namby-pamby? _ That’s not how you talk, that’s not even a real word-”

“You Village-raised kids have been spoiled by all this structure. You get sent out on real missions and you think it’s going to be like an Academy lesson, all neatly divided up into discreet sections with breaks and time to chat or fool around. But when you enter the real world, you’ll find that anything can happen at any time. You could run into trouble en route to the mission or on the return trip, or be betrayed by a team mate, or spotted by your target. Enemy shinobi could be lurking behind every bush. Once you start the mission, there is no time to goof off.”

“The fuck do you mean,  _ when you enter the real world, _ I’ve been a missing-nin for fucking  _ years- _ ”

Kakuzu allowed himself a smile under the mask. 

“Hurry up, kid-” Hidan sputtered with rage at the word  _ kid- _ “That scroll won’t steal itself.”

“Don’t call me a kid! Would you kiss a kid like you kissed me last night you old fucker?”

The dry desert air felt impossibly rough against the black tendrils anchoring his Fire Nature heart to his body. Drawing on decades of discipline and self-control, he didn’t let a single muscle twitch betray his unease at the sensation. Not even when when the fine sand grits in the wind stung the frayed skin around the gaping, tendril-choked hole where the mask used to rest. 

Hidan had not returned the mask, but he was pouting over the fight-that-wasn’t in silence, so Kakuzu generously called it a tie.

* * *

The Kumo nin were not Akatsuki material, but they were certainly good enough to realize they were being followed.

The open, barren landscape of Lighting Country offered no cover from the Kumo cell’s sharp eyes. They had crossed the border with Earth Country and were back on familiar ground, and there simply weren’t enough ambient chakra signatures for two highly-developed adult chakra systems to hide behind. 

Unfortunately for them, Kakuzu had been on the run approximately five decades too long for inconvenient environments to trip him up. He melted into the landscape, cycling through different elemental styles and throwing up genjutsus so old, they relied on methods that were no longer taught. He sank into the earth like water, went still as a stone, slid into the shadow of a desert bird flying overhead, and made his chakra squeeze down to the size of a family of small sand-dwelling rodents. Threads poured from his seams and deflated his body like a stuffed doll whose stuffing had been shaken out, and he contorted and twisted himself into inhuman shapes so that the Kumo-nin’s well-trained eyes would skip right over him as they searched for what their gut told them was there. At one point he let so much thread spool loose that he could squeeze his body, which had come to resemble a mostly-empty leather bag, into a web of cracks in the stone ground. 

Unfortunately, Hidan did not have the experience or jutsu repertoire to do the same. 

They clocked Hidan about an hour over the border. 

“Guess it’s show time,” Hidan grumbled when their targets’ flight pattern changed to favor rear defense over speed. “Hey, let’s switch jobs this time.”

That was a terrible idea, so of course he should have planned on Hidan having it.

“Why? Have you somehow undertaken ANBU training, stopped sulking about Leader-sama’s orders to let them live so they can act as witnesses, and thought better of shouting every thought that enters your head at the top of your lungs in the time since we started this mission?”

“Hell no.”

“Then how do you plan to pass for an ANBU agent from a foreign village?”

Hidan grinned and slipped Kakuzu’s mask back over his face.

“With this handy prop of yours, of course.”

What an idiot. This is what he gets for actually taking this partnership seriously. It’s what he deserves, really. He’d had the good sense to kill off his other partners, but he’d let the fact that this one was immortal convince him to give the little bastard a chance. And now here he was, in the wastes of southern Lightning Country with a moron who was about to get his ass handed to him by a group of weaker shinobi, and he was obligated to  _ care _ . 

Hidan was lucky Kakuzu would rather knife himself in the gut than pay for hotel rooms with separate beds, or the little fucker would be looking down the barrel of weeks of sleeping alone.

Behind the grimacing Fire Mask, Hidan dissolved into obnoxious giggles.

“Holy shit Kakuzu, I can’t take your glares seriously when your face is all deflated like that!”

_ Is it fondness or spite,  _ he wondered as he watched Hidan advance on the targets,  _ that keeps me from dragging him back by his ankles and putting a stop to this? _

He threw up a small genjutsu to disguise Hidan’s approach. It was gossamer thin, but that was the point. It served the double purpose of making Hidan look like a semi-competent operative capable of subterfuge and giving the targets something to ‘catch’ so they wouldn’t look for Kakuzu following in his partner’s tracks.

* * *

Hidan as an ANBU agent was, of course, a painfully obvious farce. Kakuzu’s mask sat unnaturally on his face. His overconfident stance protected his arms at the risk of his neck and torso, a style no other experienced, competent shinobi would ever have developed. On top of that, he was somehow managing to emit a sort of disappointed killing intent. 

How did he end up with such a sulk for a partner? There would be plenty of time for his precious sacrifices on other missions. 

The Kumo shinobi had stopped on a wide stone platform that ended in a ragged ridge overlooking a steep drop into a stony, barren ravine. Their tense, ready postures belied the fatigue they were sure to be suffering after their lengthy mission to steal that scroll from a heavily-guarded Iwa outpost deep in the Earth Country prairie. Kakuzu thought he could smell blood; one of them must have sustained an injury while taking it. 

Against all odds, they seemed to buy Hidan’s ANBU disguise. 

“Stop right there,” the leader called out. “What purpose have you for following us? Or, better yet, for being in this country at all?”

Blessedly, Hidan didn’t respond. The sound of his footsteps on stone was the only answer that wouldn’t allow them to identify him. 

“If you continue to advance, ANBU-san, we will take it as a declaration of aggression and respond in kind.”

One of Kakuzu’s threads twisted like a snake in the grass through the tufts of sad, brown little desert brush plants that dotted the rock like acne. The agent carrying the stolen scroll didn’t even feel it when the little black thread wrapped lightly around one end and freed it from their tough leather backpack. 

Now to make it look like  _ Hidan _ had stolen it. 

A thread twisted around the scroll and flicked the scroll into Hidan’s waiting hand. With the help of a showy but mostly useless wind jutsu to stir up the layer of sandy grit on the rocky ground, it must look as though Hidan had used an unknown and much more useful jutsu to snatch it. 

The Kumo nin reacted quickly, but not quickly enough. As soon as the scroll touched his fingers Hidan took off running. Only someone as familiar with his movements as Kakuzu could have noticed the reluctance in his flight. If Kakuzu was a betting man, he’d bet that Hidan would be back after the mission was complete to search out and sacrifice at least one of these shinobi.

The cell leader took charge. 

“Rain, Thunder, you follow him. Breeze, go south and try to cut him off. Sun, Haze, Fog, with me!” Kakuzu barely resisted rolling his eyes. As if  _ code names _ would hide any of these people’s identities from a real ANBU agent. 

The figures scattered. 

The one on the far right flicked her fingers and a tiny instrument slid out of her sleeve and into her palm. A tiny dart gun. 

Hidan was relatively impervious to many things, but drugs and poisons worked on him to an extent. If that was her specialty, then she was worth keeping an eye on. Just to make sure that idiot didn’t get hit with something that would have him stumbling around ranting about visions from Jashin.

When she sprinted off to the south, Kakuzu followed her. At this speed he had to use a couple of threads to physically drag his deflated body from crevice to shadowed crevice, but she was so focused on her task that she didn’t notice. 

She stopped when she reached a dip in the stone steppe that some scraggly, thorny little bushes were clinging to the rock. It looked exactly like every other dip in the rock they’d passed so far to Kakuzu, but this was her home turf. She knelt and pulled a container filled with dark liquid out of her bag. After slipping a pair of gloves over her hands, she dipped a series of ninja wires into the liquid, then used them to set a simple trap. The wires stretched across several yards of rock, hanging at a couple of varying heights.

The kunoichi surveyed her work, gave a sharp nod, and flickered a short distance away where she crouched behind a boulder to watch. 

A few minutes later, Hidan came tearing through the wire trap. As expected, the wires left tiny cuts along his legs, which bled for a few seconds before scabbing over. Hidan likely didn’t even notice the tiny pains, given his tolerance. 

“Got him,” the kunoichi whispered into a tiny microphone fastened to the inside of her uniform collar. “Will follow until kokorimine takes effect.”

Kakuzu recognized that toxin. It wouldn’t be much use against Hidan- it targeted the heart, making it palpitate painfully and unpredictably before quickly inducing a heart attack. None of those things would effect Hidan. 

Still holding himself down in the cracks and crevices of the stone, he made his exit.

* * *

Two hours later, he met up with Hidan on the other side of the border. 

The first words out of his mouth when they reunited were “wait until we’re done with the drop-off before you even think about going back and sacrificing one of them. They need at least a day to deliver their account of how they were attacked by a mysterious ANBU agent.”

Hidan scowled. 

“Fine, fine, you heathen.”

“And focus on controlling your heart palpitations. The worst of it should be over by now, so a little concentration on your chakra pathways will be enough to regulate them.”

“Focus on controlling my what now? The fuck are you talking about, Kakuzu?”

“One of the Kumo nin poisoned you with kokorimine. It kills by attacking the heart.”

“What, do you just know every heart-stopping poison out there? No, don’t answer that, I bet you’re just so old you’ve personally run across every single fucking one or some shit.”

“Just do it, Hidan.”

“How can I? You still haven’t given the fucking thing back!”

_ Oh right, _ Kakuzu thought. He still had Hidan’s heart, didn’t he?

Hidan caught a glimpse of the surprise on his face, and immediately burst out laughing. 

“Holy shit, you  _ forgot _ , didn’t you?”

Kakuzu growled lowly. That only made Hidan laugh harder.

“Ah, don’t worry Kakuzu. I won’t hold it against you,” he said in a fake, sugar-sweet voice. “That’s what partners do, after all.”

Kakuzu retreated into prickly silence and took off towards the drop point, forcing Hidan to run a few steps to catch up with him. 

“Hey, hey, Kakuzu, if we keep this up we’ll be giving Sasori and Deidara a run for their money on this lovey-dovey stuff. I mean, I’ve got your back,” he spun Kakuzu’s Fire mask around his wrist, “and you’re always stealing my heart-”

“Shut up if you don’t want to sleep alone tonight.”

Hidan, the little shit, just laughed off the threat.

“You love me. Hey, what do you think they’ll decide a foreign ANBU agent wanted with that scroll? They probably didn’t even read it before they nicked it. They must be scrambling around like headless chickens!”

His laughter sent a flock of crows flying away, cawing loudly. Behind them, the sun set over the horizon. 


End file.
